


Blind inexpiable things

by lotesse



Category: Firefly
Genre: Episode Related, Episode: s01e09 Ariel, Gen, Keats, Mental Health Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-22
Updated: 2014-03-22
Packaged: 2018-01-16 13:29:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1349098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/pseuds/lotesse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Digital vivisection. She doesn't want him to see. She doesn't want the bed, the cutting bed, to show him her damaged and needy spine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blind inexpiable things

Simon asks if River is ready, and the question coming through in his dear dear dear dear voice is the only thing that lets her swallow down her fear, lie down still and straight on the cool metal bed. 

She comprehends what it will be: digital vivisection. And she doesn't want him to see. She doesn't want the bed, the cutting bed, to show him her damaged and needy spine. She doesn't want him to see the half-dead zombie mess that they left in her head where her brains should be. If he sees it he'll know her secret: that she's not who she was before, that the sister he'd crossed the 'verse for died on the operating table and all that was left was a shambles, scars and sharp bits and only a rotten core where the girl-part ought to be. 

Jayne Judas Girl's-Name Cobb slides the door shut and lights come up: soft angel core-world glow. Simon is looking down at her, his eyes all big and soft, the desire to _fix_ shining out of his face like an aureole. Just seconds ago, she'd watched things shift and change around him; a man who had died after an operation didn't. Simon is good at fixing anatomical and chemical problems in living things. She has to tell him “yes.”

It had all seemed simple, before. Beauty was harmony and functionality was Best. She'd debated the old rhyme with her mother, in before: _beauty is truth, truth beauty_ , the clinching line of a recorded poetic fragment from Old Earth. Her mother had argued for a more sophisticated interpretation, trying to convince River-That-Was that on the whole the poet questioned the veracity of that final clichéd line. But River had dug in her little-girl heels; in her unknowing mind, there in the time before, the most beautiful things had been truths, the pieces of right knowledge dancing all around her all the time in such lovely patterns. River had been enchanted by the symmetry of the universe, back then, before she'd seen its warps and tearing stretches and impossible bends.

Now she lies on the seeing slab and closes her eyes. Simon will see it for her; she can always look at her reflection in him, later, when it will be safe to encounter herself. He makes a gentle mirror.

 _again and again and again,_ he says. She feels his revulsion in his hands and has to fight herself not to recoil from it, not to bite his clever fingers off at the second knuckle. Simon knows what cutting into brains feels like. Simon would never hurt without healing, she reminds herself, not her good blue-and-golden Simon. He's not like them not like her he's not like her he's not. 

River, too, knows what cutting into brains feels like.


End file.
